Twelve hours after Kate Sumner’s broken body is washed up on a deserted beach on the south coast of England, her traumatized three-year-old daughter is discovered twenty miles away walking the streets of Poole, alone. The police are puzzled.

Why weren’t mother and daughter together? Why was Kate killed and her daughter allowed to live? More curiously, why had Kate boarded a boat – apparently willingly – when she was scared stiff of drowning at sea? Who had tempted her to her death?

The police suspect a young actor, a loner with an appetite for pornography, who lies about his relationship with Kate and whose sailing boat, Crazy Daze, is moored just yards from where the toddler was found…

As the investigation proceeds, the police discover a gaping hole in Kate’s husband’s alibi. Was he really in Liverpool at a conference the night she died? Was Kate the “respectable woman” he claims she was?

And why does their daughter scream in terror every time he tries to pick her up…?